Safety first
by ropesburg
Summary: There were rules, guidelines, and a hefty manual on how to deal with stress. Elizabeth Keen must have missed that class. AU, canonverse. Lizzington.
**AU** where Red is simply her dad's long lost best friend or whatever. Let's not go into detail, alright? **Lizzington.**

I swear I didn't mean to end up here it just happened.

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Chapter one

The day she shoved the pen in his neck had started out like a normal day. For all intents and purposes, a passable, normal week. What fuzz had been born as a helicopter dropped down on her street had quickly simmered down into the stumbling everyday. Tom and Elizabeth Keen had stood on the steps to their house as a police escort came to airlift her to god-knows-where. Cool. The kids had stopped and stared, cradling their longboards under their arms and gaping, slack-jawed, at the stomping chopper that stood smack-dab among the cars. Tom had waved, once, as they flew off with his wife. From inside the helicopter, Elizabeth didn't notice.

It was a chaos they could deal with. The neighbors chalked it up to her vague government job, their friends thought it was _hilarious_ that a spring chicken profiler got vacuumed straight to Pentagon. Maddie, her closest neighbor and fellow victim of the rude Mr. Saltzman two doors down, had sighed, longingly. "I've always wanted to fly in a helicopter." _That,_ she'd shrugged off. Elizabeth smiled and shook her head in disbelief. "I don't know why they did it either." She dealt with it. They dealt with it, the Keen's. They dealt with it.

It had been a normal day. She'd gone to work, to her job in the bizarre bunker, her strange intangible job under a shady organization. They were meant to catch crooks, not put them in aquariums. And the biggest crook of all was waiting for her. She was a pawn, meant to be moved around. She sat down in front of him, the industrial light ticking overhead. Cameras, feeds, microphones. They were watched, nailed into this place like a bug to a board, thoroughly inspected. The man across from her was older. Criminal. He was a criminal. Leader of a crime ring, syndicate. She'd been singled out. Of all the far more experienced profilers, people with doctrines of convictions. Whoever this man was, _Reddington_ , he'd been pulling strings. Or pulling rank. He'd pulled something alright, even if it was simply all the fire alarms in the building, to get her here.

He was quizzical. He tacked on questions at the end of every conversation. Reddington was weird. She could handle weird, surely. She could handle chaos and handle herself and handle the unending stream of documents that met her every time she opened their mailbox. "Why me?" she'd asked.

Back home, at her dad's place, they had a flat-coated retriever. At fourteen, the dog was a constant pain in her dad's ass. A senile, happy mess that peed on the curtains and stole sandwiches off of the cheap coffee table. "Come on!" her dad exclaimed, seeing his dinner going down onto the floor. Ignoring him completely, the dog wolfed the bread down, its wispy tail insistently wagging. Her dad had had the dog for as long as she could remember, and despite its increasing confusion, he couldn't bring himself to chastise it. They spent their evenings in the sofa, the dog sleeping in his lap. "You're hopeless," her father would mutter, scratching the offered belly. "What am I to do with you?"

Seeing the dog roam about, she'd felt frustration and bewilderment. It echoed back to her. She'd never seen the man in person. He'd popped up on a lecture or two, like a receipt she'd put in a drawer, not meant to be remembered. She could profile him, could look at the books and the forms and the DSM-5. What she did wasn't going to matter. Her job, as it pertained to this exact set of organization, did nothing for her, or them, or him. In this setting, she was of little importance.

The man looked at her. She fired off questions rapidly, a verbal shock and awe that merely dug up dirt between them. There was an uneasy set to her shoulders, a gigantic wall of misunderstanding that she was meant to clear up.

 _What am I to do with you?_

Though the confusion he created had little to do with why she'd rammed a dark blue ball-point pen into his neck.

Seeing Tom like that – rippled, ragged, torn – had set off something in her. Like slipping from a balance board, it took some time to find consensus, find her balance. It was like that. An expert at holding it together, she'd almost managed throughout. It was Reddington's coolness, his inability to care, that made the cup overflow. Bombs could be set to go off and it was awful, and perhaps people would die, but those people were not _Tom._ She should care about the citizens, about her neighbors, kids in school, she should reserve a place in her judgment for all of those people, she should have when she took the job. But at the bureau they'd never taught her how to pick the love of her life over the lives of others. Theoretical books and practicing told her nothing. Tom was minutely gutted, spilling out, and his racing pulse cried in her hands. The blood flow was the last siren song, a mating call for boats set to run aground. With that in mind, she went to Reddington. After watching the prospective father of her child stain the carpets with erythrocytes, she went to find some answers. They took the gun from her at the entrance but she barely noticed it. What she had, brimming with anger, was a thousand coils wound up at breaking point. It was laughable that he let her in, he was a foolish man, resting on his name for support. As if a name made him untouchable. As if his name would stop her.


End file.
